California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) commemorated the U.S. National Computer Science Education Week yesterday with a panel discussion (press release). I had the pleasure of participating along with Sue Higgens from the Naval Postgraduate School, Andrès Ornelas from Google, and Srikar Kandaswamy from Cisco. One of the goals of the CS Education Week is to drive enrollment in CS education, which has, unfortunately, been in decline in the US over the past few years. To this end, we were invited to talk about what we do at our jobs, the role a CS degree plays in our careers, and our experiences in school.

Among other things, I learned more about the raw computing power employed by the US Department of Defense, and how it isn’t all used for war. There is a lot of buzz around scalability in the Web world, but scalability is also an important issue for the Navy developers down the road from CSUMB that calculate global maritime weather forecasts. As a side note, Ms. Higgens actually met Grace Hopper(!).